


Meet Me in the Woods

by Mornelithe_falconsbane



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Jashinism, Senju Tobirama Needs a Hug, Torture, and he gets one, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-08 04:00:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20303680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mornelithe_falconsbane/pseuds/Mornelithe_falconsbane
Summary: Tobirama has a list of regrets. He’s been working on it for six days, listing out his first--and greatest--as they beat him unconscious on day one.





	Meet Me in the Woods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fencesit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fencesit/gifts).

Tobirama has a list of regrets. He’s been working on it for six days, listing out his first--and greatest--as they beat him unconscious on day one. But that’s just a warm up, a prelude to the hot irons and the creative rope usage. He’d been premature, starting with the worst.

It means he’d started with not being good enough to save his younger brothers (accompanied by very dire threats from his captors), and continued downward into ever more trivial regrets until he was regretting the time he woke up an hour earlier than he needed to on that mission last April (and they’re breaking his fingers, they’re burning his skin, they’re laughing as they--) because the bed had been so comfortable. He really _ should _ have slept in.

It would have been nice.

He’s stupid hungry when he’s regretting not eating more last time he’d eaten, his mouth like a desert when he regrets not drinking every minute of his life before this. They pour buckets of snow on Tobirama, and he regrets not spending more time around fires, wrapped in blankets, with food and water. 

They still haven’t asked him anything, haven’t said anything that wasn’t an excited suggestion of what to do next, and Tobirama silently regrets not spending more time with Hashirama. Sure he’d spent probably a third of his waking hours with Hashirama, but it would have been good if Tobirama had spent closer to two thirds. Hashirama drove him insane half the time, but Tobirama would give anything to have him here now.

He stops trying to call it a regrets list on day seven, when they start talking about killing him and how to make it hurt the most. It’s a list of wishes now, a list of all the things he hadn’t gotten a chance to do--finish that seal, write that letter, pick up that book he put down four months ago and forgot about. It would have been nice to live to see if Hashirama ever suckered Madara into that village. The logistics were horrible, but they both sucked at logistics, so maybe. Maybe. 

He feels the chakra around him like he hears underwater, muddied and strange and hard to interpret, but it’s the only way Tobirama can track them, feel them before they touch him. His eyes--it probably doesn’t matter anymore. He thinks they’re still there, at least, just. Not working. 

It feels hungry, the air worn raw and thin from Tobirama’s pain--arrogant thought, the world has never cared about anyone’s pain--

But they’ve decided, finally. Tobirama really hates what they’ve decided on, but he’s really hated all of this. If this is the end, then he has a last regret, raw and hurt and very new, but at least he won’t have it for long.

He wishes that someone had loved him. That he’d gotten to hold someone’s hand in the rain and lean against their side for no reason except him wanting to, or whatever love really was (Tobirama doesn’t know why he keeps picturing that, his thoughts circling like birds at dusk. He’s going to die, and he’s going to die soon, and no one’s going to care).

Tobirama is flat on his back, the stone pushing the salt into new cracks in his scabs and he’s so cold he can’t even shiver, so hungry it’s hard to breathe, and he’s so tired that he might fall asleep before they get around to the final ruination of him.

It feels like the darkness around him has Teeth. And Eyes. And It’s Watching.

The horrible, muddy chakra bounces toward him, and the darkness beckons. Then it waves. It grins at him, and there’s more teeth than Tobirama can count.

They laugh, exultant, and Tobirama wishes them dead, wishes on them what they have done to him, and like it heard his thought, the mouth in the dark is pressing against his, bare teeth cold on his raw lips.

He breathes in, feels the cold blood dripping from his hands and knows the connection between himself and them. It’s shining in the darkness, built thread by thread in Tobirama’s pain.

Pain was salvation, was life, was a two-sided blade that bled passion and freedom. Generously, they’d given it all to Tobirama and kept none for themselves.

His eyes open, blind from salt and sand, and they’re cutting the wires around his wrists, getting fresh new blood on their hands. His blood, filled with his fear and regrets and desires. 

The Darkness suggests, very gently, that Tobirama share with them. 

It’s a good idea. His blood quickens, dripping up their wrists in seals of binding, seals of chakra eating, and--formed in Tobirama’s mind in a breath, utterly different from any seal he’s ever seen--seals of transference. His pain is their pain, their chakra is his chakra, his death is their death.

He sits up as they start screaming, the shifting bones under his skin shared three times over. The Darkness is laughing inside Tobirama’s skin, rocks shifting deep underground.

Tobirama stands on broken feet sliced from toe to heel, and walks out over their bodies, his chakra coils stuffed full and his pain so beautiful that his blind eyes are crying.

Then he walks the fuck out.

***

He collapses next to a tree, falling to his knees in snow so cold it hurts. The Darkness is gone, the stolen chakra is spent, and Tobirama’s just going to die slightly later. He forgot to get food, water, clothes as he’d walked out over the bodies of his enemies, which would have made a legend of him if he’d survived, but as it is, is just going to have his name quietly forgotten by the clan.

If they ever find his corpse.

If anyone ever looks for it.

If anyone ever tries to figure out what happened to him.

That’s a lot of ‘if’s. Tobirama doesn’t think much of his chances.

Tobirama can sense _ home _ like a lighthouse of familiar chakra in the distance, and he tries to get up, pain incandescent in his bones and muscles. He fails seventeen times, leaving a trail of blood and crushed snow behind him, and then he crawls, futile and stupid as it is.

He falls for the last time by running headfirst into what feels like a fallen tree, too big to crawl over. Everything hurts, everything is cold, home is days away, and there’s nothing transcendent or beautiful about it, no matter what the Darkness had told him.

Tobirama curls up under the tree, deeply disgruntled by the ignobility and futility of his death.

***

He jolts awake to someone yelling Hashirama’s name.

“Over here!” Tobirama draws in a sharp breath, blinking when it doesn’t hurt, blinking again when he can see and the snow is just scattered patches on the ground, not nearly as deep as he'd thought it was last night. Uchiha Madara is crouched in front of him, two fingers pressing lightly into Tobirama's wrist--the cuts from the wires are healed white--and Tobirama's stomach is still dropping in fear when he feels Hashirama's chakra charging toward them.

The hints of green beneath the snow grow into joyous tendrils as Hashirama bursts through the trees, his hair catching on branches budding with new leaves. Grass curls around Tobirama’s nearly healed fingers the second Hashirama sees him.

Hashirama stops inches away and drops to his knees, crying already, the big sap. “Tobirama--”

Tobirama is too big for this, he is, he’s fourteen and not a kid. But he lunges at Hashirama anyway, and ends up in Hashirama’s lap, hugged so tight he can barely breathe, just like he knows he will. "You’re _ dirty_,” Hashirama whines, but he doesn’t even pretend like he’s not crying into Tobirama’s neck. 

He hears Madara mutter something, and Tobirama should be listening, but he's just--he's really glad to see Hashirama. Then Madara is setting his indigo coat over Tobirama's shoulders, and it smells like pines and smoke, and Tobirama starts shivering so hard he feels like his bones are going to come apart.

"What happened to you?" Hashirama murmurs, and Tobirama couldn't answer that if he tried.


End file.
